Category Archives: Marketing

Reviewmeta has published a study which finds that about 20% of all product reviews on Amazon are actually fake. Looking at 7 million reviews on various Amazon country pages, the company showed that after sorting out fake reviews, the overall evaluation of products was significantly different.

If you closely follow the advertising world you might have seen the shit-storm that overcame Pepsi earlier this month following the launch over a campaign that meant to align Pepsi with the political #resistance movement in the US. The PR disaster for Pepsi evolved out of a on only half-hearted approach to political themes – as there really is no political… Read More »

Currently Domino’s Pizza is one of the hottest (!) brands in the food business. It is financially outperforming tech companies such as Amazon and Facebook, is venturing into the robot business and has recently been applauded for crafting a “brand icon” similar to Apple or Google. And that all after going through some really tough times – both financially… Read More »

By accident I recently came across an article that I have first read a few years ago, published in MIT Sloan Management Review. And I still find the core idea a very current one: how project management can benefit from brand management. The basic idea is that there is a market for projects inside any larger institution and… Read More »

A particularly smart way of adapting your marketing messages to short-notice changes in your marketing environment is through humor and closer emotional bonds. A great example of this is the campaign that Royal Jordanian has been running in reaction to Donald Trump’s #travelban. You would think there isn’t much that an airline could do to live with the… Read More »

Mark Bonchek and Cara France published their thoughts on means to achieve creative marketing on the HBR Blog. Their five theses or recommendations can be summarized as follows: Create with (not just for) the customer – This is all about involving customers right from the early stages of product development, using their experiences, expectations and drivers of satisfaction… Read More »

Every year since 2010, Bright Local, an online search agency, conducts a large study on the role and relevance of online reviews. The most recent Online Review Survey provides a few very meaningful insights into the role of online review for buying decisions. It shows a further increase in the role of such reviews for online shoppers and holds… Read More »

Over the weekend, I came across a very interesting exercise. In a move to find out how perceptions of beauty vary across the globe, the guys from Super Drug Online Doctors asked 18 designers across the globe to retouch an image of an underwear model to best fit with their culture’s perception of beauty and the “ideal female form”. Now… Read More »

Two researchers of Ohio State University have conducted a meta-analysis on research on the effect of sex and crime in advertisement. They come to a surprising conclusion – against the common sense notion of “Sex sells”: “As intensity of sexual ad content increased, memory, attitudes, and buying intentions decreased.” They found that as the emotional intensity of marketing… Read More »

On the weekend I came across a remarkable chat between an Amazon customer and a customer service agent. While it is of course not realistic that every customer is treated in this way (and some agents or also customers might have reacted completely adversely), for me it really is a stunning piece of excellent communication with customers. It… Read More »